The Artwork of Karl Sterrer
Born on December 4th of 1885 in Vienna, Karl Sterrer was an Austrian engraver and painter. The son of a sculptor, he studied at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and was awarded in 1908 the Academy’s prestigious traveling scholarship, the Rompreis, for his landscapes and portraits. Sterrer traveled to the south of Italy in the years 1910 and 1911 to continue his studies and to paint.
Sterrer was one of the first Austrian artists to be intrigued by the works of the emerging German Expressionist artists. Beginning in 1910-1911, he began to strip his landscape compositions to their essentials, by emphasizing the deep, dark lines of his drypoint technique. Sterrer became a member in 1911 of Vienna’s Künstierhaus, at that time the exhibition and meeting hall of the more traditional Vienna Artists’ Society.
In November of 1915, at the beginning of World War I, Karl Sterrer joined the Landsturm, a reserve militia force in Austria, and applied to its propaganda service as a war artist. The following year, he was sent to the Russian and Italian theaters of war where he served until the summer of 1918, at which time he was transferred to the Tyrolean front in western Austria at the special request of the Air Force. 
Working under the command of the Imperial and Royal Air Force of Austria-Hungary, Sterrer drew and painted portraits of aviator pilots, illustrations of aircraft, and produced advertising posters promoting the purchase of war bonds.
After having been awarded the 1919 Reichel Artists Prize, Karl Sterrer became a Professor of Fine Arts at the Vienna Academy in 1921, where he would teach such future artists as landscape painter Leopold Hauer who was deeply influenced by Egon Schiele’s work: painter Rudolf Hausner, a surrealist considered to be the first psychoanalytical painter; expressionist graphic artist and illustrator Hans Fronius; and Max Weiler, who developed his own naturalistic form of abstraction. Dismissed from his academic post at the time of Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, Sterrer was reinstated after joining the Nazi Party. However, because of that affiliation, he was again dismissed at the end of World War II; but he was allowed to keep his pension.
After 1946, Karl Sterrer devoted most of his work to religious subjects. In recognition of the scope of his work, he was awarded in 1957 the Austrian State Grand Prize for Fine Art. Karl Sterrer died in June of 1972 at the age of eighty-six and is buried in the Hütteldorfer cemetery in Vienna.
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The success of Karl Sterrer’s exhibition in Maysedergass, Austria, was due in part to the support of his generous benefactor, lawyer and architect Baron Heinrich von Haerdt, who would support Sterrer and his family over the coming years. In the summer of 1913, Sterrer and his family were invited to stay as guests of the Baron at his estate in Styria. Sterrer created several oil and tempera paintings during this stay, of which one was the oil painting “Das Klagelied”.
Dedicated to Baron Heinrich von Haerdtl, the painting is divided horizontally into two parts. In the lower section, a river nymph bends over to kiss a drowned man; the upper section depicts the drowned man’s wife, sitting on the bank of the river Mur and singing a song of grief. These elements formed the basic image of the painting. However, Sterrer transformed and idealized the image by transitioning the river scene into a broad, peaceful lake, plied by sailing boats and overlaid by a blue sky.
The Sterrer family lived close to the bank of the Mur River, which was often a terrifying, loudly rushing body of water. They were acquainted with a woman whose husband, a raftsman, had drowned in the Mur during the early 1910s.